Category Archives: History

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On this week’s show we ask whether the bicycle and cycling are inherently left-wing or right-wing. Featuring Ruth Beale and Karen Breneman, two artists who recently rode together from London to the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home in Liverpool in search of cycling’s socialist and non-conformist past, present and future. Putting the case for the libertarian right is the leading political blogger and cyclist Guido Fawkes who explains why leading members of the British Conservative Party are so keen to advertise their taste for two wheeled transport.

This weekend get on down to Rollapaluza XI “Kingspin” on Friday night at the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes and Tour De Play, ‘a five mile cycle tour looking at playscapes as a form of outsider architecture’ starting at the South London Gallery at 12 noon on Saturday.

Paul Wonnacott has been buying, repairing and selling on used bicycles in the English countryside for almost thirty years. In an extended interview he looks back at the changes he has observed in the bicycle manufacturing industry (most of them bad) and grapples with a hoarder’s inner demon as he watches his huge stock literally pile up and up. Also mentioned in the show is the Waterfront London exhibition and series of breakfast talks at New London Architecture on Store Street, the Italian writer Ugo Riccarelli in conversation with journalist Richard Williams on the occasion of the publication of the English edition of Coppi’s Angel on 30 January at the Italian Cultural Institute. And the deadline for submissions to the 2008 Bicycle Film Festival is looming: 19 February.

In this week’s show we remember ‘Major’ Marshall Taylor, a world champion cyclist from the 1890s and the first black American sports superstar. Kieron Yates talks about Major Taylor’s life with Lynne Tolman of the Major Taylor Association. We also ride the 2006 Etape Du Tour with Alex Murray.

This week’s show features an interview with David Herlihy, author of ‘Bicycle‘ the recently published definitive history of the bicycle (Yale University Press). Kieron Yates reports on the London-Edinburgh-London audax/endurance ride.

Feature on the more than century-old London Velodrome at Herne Hill, and interview with Graeme Geddes of the Friends of the London Velodrome. A 1961 IBM computer playing ‘Daisy Daisy’, Velorution weblog, The Mountains to the South by Simon Kunath and Richard Kunath.